My room is slowly disassembling.  (Not really: being stripped of its frippery is a more accurate description.)  In three days, I will get on an airplane and a stranger will start sleeping in my bed.  Only briefly.  One month, even less.  I will only be out of the country for a little over two weeks, which is not so much time if you think about it.  But I'm leaving work for a month.  I'm putting all my odds and ends in boxes to shove into them into the utility closet.  I am preparing to say goodbye to normal life for a little while.

I have been panicking, the last couple days, because I was on the verge of getting sick, sick in a really nasty way that would have made it almost impossible to get on a plane on Saturday.  I didn't realize how much of myself I have hung on this trip until it became endangered: The pieces of me that have been living in London all this time.  The pieces of me that feel right and well only when sitting with Rawaan and Annie, as we gaze at each other in mutual adoration.  The pieces of me that hate going to work every day.  The pieces of me that love watching movies on airplanes. 

The danger seems to have passed.  I am still on a knife's edge, though I think now everything is okay.  And of course, it would be okay anyway.  Even if I had to push my flight back, I would still go.  Even if I didn't go, all of those pieces of me would survive.  They've survived the last year and a half, or longer, and they will keep surviving, waiting for their turn.  But I really do very much hope their turn comes on Saturday.

Work is ridiculous.  I want to say, it will be over soon, I will be gone, but I have a terrible feeling that even though I'll be gone it won't be over, and it will haunt me all through the month of December.  Maybe I am just overwhelmed right now though.  They won't be able to get to me when I am half a world away, unless I let them.

Oh, I finished NaNoWriMo!  Last Sunday.  I reached 50,000 words (plus 90 or so) and have not touched it since.  I have a lot of novel left to go, and I do want to write it, but I haven't had time.  Maybe on the airplane.  Maybe in Rawaan's garden, giggling and smoking shisha and scribbling away.

Normally when I write in here and say that life is busy, I mean that it is busy, but I still have time to read the New York Times online.  I just prefer reading the Times to writing in here, most days; it's easier, and if I don't read the Times the day does not feel complete, but if I don't write in here I get by okay.

I mention this, because when I say that life is busy right now, I don't mean in that way.  I mean in the have-not-read-the-Times-all-week way.  In the behind-on-NaNo way.  The will-have-to-work-this-weekend-because-8-to-9-hours-of-work-a-day-is-not-enough way.  The having-a-party-tomorrow way.  The going-home-for-Thanksgiving way.  The leaving-the-country-in-two-weeks way.

(Two weeks!  Hurrah!)

I literally have not had a moment to relax.  Which is okay, overall, I am fine being busy.  What's less okay is knowing I'm going to have to work this weekend (ugh) and going back and forth about how stressed I should be about NaNo.  On the one hand, I have 37,700 words, which is pretty damn good - better than most people, I assume, since we're just over halfway through the month.  On the other hand, I am insanely busy, and I am just going to get busier, and I REALLY want to get to 50,000 words before Thanksgiving so I can relax about it.  Also, I said I would finish before Thanksgiving, and I am an insane, uptight person who hates missing deadlines, even self-imposed ones.  I've decided that, to finish by Thanksgiving, I need to write between 7,500 and 10,000 words this weekend.  While throwing a party.  And writing a paper for work.

I mentioned that I'm crazy right?  I'm crazy.

On Saturday I helped high school seniors with their college admissions essays: a boy explaining how being in jail taught him that he wanted to go to college and be a children's attorney; a girl pondering whether there was a word in her native language for bisexual.  I got home tired (I have a cold which has wiped me out all weekend) and starving, and missed "Thriller" while I was eating.  I am a little, but not a lot, disappointed; I have no regrets about the matter.

I am hormonal and have a head cold, and wrote a very general and rather angry post on Friday.  Like many general and angry posts, it contained some truths and a lot of over or under statements, so broad as to lose any real meaning.  I blame the head cold, and too many editorials/articles/etc. which refer to my generation as one entity, as if everyone between the ages of 18 and 25 has the same worldview, the same motivation or lack thereof.  I admit in responding, I was guilty of the same generational-ism.  That cannot possibly be a real world.

In other news: I went to a pumpkin carving party today.  I have a slight complex about pumpkin carving, due to the fact that my pumpkins usually come out with one enormous mouth (having screwed up the teeth or jagged edges or whatever was supposed to make the mouth interesting) and unevenly sized (and placed) oval eyes.  In short, they continue to look like a five year old carved them.  This despite the fact that my mother, the artist, is able to pick up a knife (a regular knife, not one of those special pumpkin-carving saws) and create lovely and creepy faces without template or forethought.  Pumpkin carving is a yearly reminder that I am not artistically inclined.  This year, I caved, and used a pattern.  Now I feel inadequate in a whole new way!

(I'm kidding, mostly.  I love carving pumpkins.  Even though I suck at it.)

NaNoWriMo starts on Thursday.  I am all geared up, though I keep making plans for social engagements after Thursday, without really meaning to.  Still, I have confidence that I will keep pace: I have a 10 page scene-by-scene outline to keep me chugging along, and a goal of finishing before Thanksgiving which requires 2,500 words a day.  Now I just have to hope the cold goes away, all of my friends cancel on me, and my characters and narrator cooperate once I actually start writing.  This process is so different from how I normally go about writing I'm not quite sure what to do with myself, or how it will go once I get started.  Usually I start with characters and get to know them very well, writing about them, trying out different narrative voices.  I don't discover the plot until much, much later, and it grows out of the characters, and expands slowly, internally.  In this case, I started with a plot and fit characters into it; granted I changed parts of the plot to fit the characters better, but the overall structure remained the same.  I now have a description of every scene, but haven't written a word - I have no idea how the voice or characters will actually sound when I start writing.

Luckily, it doesn't matter much.  This is not supposed to be good.  I have to keep telling myself that, because I keep forgetting.  I'm sure when I am actually producing 2,500 words a day, it will become much easier to remember.